Word: pankau
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Where did the money go? That's the most vexing question produced by the rampant fraud that has wiped out hundreds of banks and thrifts in recent years. But Edmund Pankau, a Houston private eye, knows how to find the booty. Case in point: last fall a real estate developer who was two years delinquent on a $2 million loan suddenly showed up at his Houston bank and offered to settle for $200,000. Bank officers wondered whether he might be harboring far more cash. They called in Pankau, who combed public records and found that the developer had come...
Investigators like Pankau are playing a growing role in helping sort out the savings and loan mess, a debacle that could cost more than $300 billion over the next three decades. According to top federal regulators, fraud was responsible for as much as 60% of all S&L failures in 1989. By hiring investigators to pick up the paper trail where overburdened prosecutors have left off, the new buyers of old thrifts can often recover a hefty share of the loot. "There's a real demand for specialists who can read between the lines," says Joseph Wells, chairman...
Operating out of a steel-and-glass Houston skyscraper once owned by a failed thrift, Pankau, 44, directs his own agency, Intertect. (Its fee: $60 to $100 an hour.) Pankau's 30 investigators assemble financial profiles of S&L scoundrels who have bled their institutions dry through bad loans and insider dealings. Often court judgments are pending against the culprits, but the regulators or new banks holding the bad notes need to know whether the assets are sizable enough to pursue. "These are world-class con men who were just as sophisticated in hiding their money as they were...
JAILHOUSE ROCKS. Federal prosecutors are still having trouble building their case against Manuel Noriega, but the extent to which the deposed dictator plundered Panama is becoming clearer. Edmund Pankau, a Houston private detective, has put together an inventory of Noriega's vast real estate holdings from papers found after his arrest. The list includes two office buildings in New Orleans, interests in Florida hotels, property in Tel Aviv and the south of France, an Italian villa and a house in Spain. Total value: more than $800 million...